Michael Koortbojian has written a learned and serious book about some
of the ways Roman artists constructed meanings on funerary monuments. The
book focuses on two primary themes represented on Roman sarcophagi of the
later second and third centuries: the myths of Adonis and of Endymion. It
asks, most importantly, how individual motifs and narrative structures
were used to communicate meanings and how viewers came to understand those
meanings. Koortbojian thus works in the same field as some of the most
important historians of Roman art from Carl Robert and Gerhard Rodenwaldt
to Helmut Sichtermann, Guntram Koch, and Koortbojian's teacher, Richard
Brilliant.1 He continues the ongoing
discussion about the
interpretation of myth on sarcophagi that began well before the famous
debate of the 1940's between Franz Cumont and Arthur Darby Nock about how
much complex philosophical or religious meaning attached to mythological
imagery in funerary art.2 His
contributions are not simply to the
reinterpretation of individual monuments but to the presentation of a
clear model for the way artists and viewers understood the reuse of
standard motifs that never lost their meaningful connections to their
original narrative settings. He also reaffirms the necessity of seeing
this artistic process in relation to the visual habits of viewers whose
large image repertoire remained fixed in their memories firmly enough to
allow them to read an image within its new setting while holding onto the
old setting; thus could multiple layers of meaning come to be apprehended.
And finally, he demonstrates the extent to which the Cumont and Nock
positions have begun to yield a synthesis, an interpretation of
sarcophagus imagery as meaningful on multiple levels yet never purely
illustrative of a priori ideas and texts.

What has happened
in the field of sarcophagus studies since the 1940s has much to do with
the mediation of German scholarship. Not only have German scholars been
responsible for much of the cataloguing of mythological sarcophagi, they
(although they have hardly been the only ones) have also explored the
iconography of individual myths,3
examined the programs of sarcophagi
in relation to patrons' needs and to the use of groups of individual myths
and motifs,4 and given serious thought
to the way narration
works.5 What they brought to these studies,
along with superb
scholarship was a position neither as rigidly pragmatist as Nock's nor as
luxuriantly romantic as Cumont's. Looking at the way the sarcophagi
worked, they assembled a corpus of usable analyses on which studies such
as Koortbojian's are built and which permit Koortbojian and others to
assume a base level of meaning in the myths, a level onto which could be
mapped more complex individual interpretations that met the needs of
devotees or of formalists. The images are neither wall-paper nor are they,
at least not necessarily, Pythagorean debates.

All this provides
the
ground-work for Koortbojian's explorations of the two myths. Building to
some degree on Brilliant's Visual Narratives, the author
systematically constructs an argument about choices and manipulations of
motifs and compositions. He demonstrates first that individual motifs were
often standardized; they could be moved from one narrative to another, but
they usually bore with them the ideas they had carried in their original
narrative settings. Thus, the Endymion myth was depicted with certain
elements normally present: The goddess descends from her carriage, her
eyes fixed on the sleeping and often nude body of her beloved youth (Ch.
4). But the myth might also be shown in variations, usually later than
this scene type with its implications of narrative that come from the
representation of the goddess as arriving. Cupid and Psyche might offer a
parallel (76), another repeated visit by a night-time lover; the shepherd
might suggest that the world of the hereafter should be understood as
bucolic and serene (78-84); Endymion might appear alone as an abstraction
from his story, capable of reminding the right viewers of the whole story
and its layers of meaning (91-98, and 135-41). At the center of the
process is the implication not only that the artist has building blocks
with which to work and understands how to manipulate meaning by conscious
choices and arrangements but also that the viewer carries with him/her a
large set of understood images and can participate in the construction of
new meanings from standard motifs through the reassembly of memory blocks.

The complexity of the building process, the way it works, is at the
heart
of the book, and Koortbojian explores the variants of the Adonis and
Endymion myths as they take on and discard pieces of both visual and
literary traditions. In the process he makes the case for several new
interpretations of monuments, interpretations that readers may find more
or less convincing depending on how willing they are to accept certain
basic assertions. An example can be found in the author's discussion of
the Adonis myth in his third chapter (Adonis Redivivus). Here, having
shown convincingly in the previous chapter that the artists chose for
depiction scenes and motifs that would emphasize the concept of heroic
death and virtus, Koortbojian notes the absence of references
to the Adonaia and to the symbolic rebirth of Adonis. He suggests that
variations on the standard type, on one sarcophagus in the form of
rearrangement of elements, and on another through the introduction of a
scene from the Aeneas repertoire, permitted the interpretation of the myth
not only retrospectively, to "celebrate the life of the deceased" by
mythic analogy, but also allowed "a prospective vision that
augments the mythological analogy and evokes ... a new fate for its
protagonist" (49). The rearrangement appears on a sarcophagus of the early
third century in the Vatican where we read from left to right the hero
with Venus in a kind of farewell, his horse at the ready, the couple
enthroned in the center (their faces now portraits) as a doctor and an
eros
tend the wounded thigh of the upright and alert Adonis, and finally,
Adonis fallen as the boar rushes at him from the right and the goddess
rushes in from the left. Unlike the usual arrangement and representation,
couple parting at left, boar hunt in the center, and hero dying in Venus'
arms at right, the new configuration, according to the author, emphasizes,
first, the importance and the equality of the lovers (thus connecting the
deceased couple with them) that communicates Adonis' divinization, second,
the apotheosis evoked by enthronement, and, finally, the cleansing of the
hero's "revivified body for its presence among the gods" (53). Not only
does the new arrangement convey the hope for the future of the deceased
but it also "tells the tale of Aphrodite's powers, if not to forestall
Fate, at least to have the final say in the drama" (53).

I think
this
interpretation works well in suggesting how much composition has to do
with the kind of meaning communicated; it also makes clearer the way the
portraits participate in the reconfiguration. Not all readers will be
equally convinced by all the interpretations, some of which seem to me to
be overargued on the basis of too little evidence (the analogy of Adonis
and Aeneas, for example, pp. 53-62), but the demonstration of processes
for the construction of meaning through analogy and the uses of memory
remains absolutely worthwhile and provides a highly useful model for other
interpreters.

This book raises a number of interesting questions
that it
addresses less fully than those I have noted above; I hope that
Koortbojian will soon produce studies of these. Among them, I would point
first to further discussion of the role of historical change and context
in the representations of myth on sarcophagi. Although Koortbojian is
always attentive to the problem of trying to define the structures of
eschatological belief in the Roman world through both textual and visual
sources, and although he has offered an interesting and useful assessment
of debates about "demythologization" (138-40), he has not given a central
place to the problem of changes in beliefs over time nor has he devoted
much space to analysis of the multiplicity of audiences for whom there was
probably less uniformity of belief than our readings of elite literary
texts and formulaic inscriptions might indicate. Another desideratum of
mine, on a more specific level, would be further investigation of the
difference that gender might make in our thinking about these two myths,
given that both are unusual in focusing on the youthful mortal male
beloved of a female deity. To compare the treatment of Adonis and Endymion
with that of Ariadne or Rhea Silvia would be especially interesting from
the point of view of their differing degrees of passivity or agency in the
stories as represented on sarcophagi and from the point of view as well of
the difference gender makes in the outcomes of the stories (Koortbojian
addresses himself to outcomes in important ways but without really dealing
with gender); the analogies proposed by poses and compositional motifs as
well as by pendants (Endymion and Selene with Mars and Rhea Silvia,
102-106) beg for more exploration of gender politics, and so does the
author's glance at the analogical relationship of the poses of Venus and
Adonis with Phaedra and Hippolytus (30-31). I am not asking him to have
written a different book; I am asking him to write yet more and to
continue the discussion of sarcophagi and meaning by pushing its limits.

NOTES

[1] Carl Robert, initiator of the
still-ongoing series,
Die
Antiken Sarcophagreliefs, began his great work in the 1880s and
1890s; Rodenwaldt published on sarcophagi in the 1930s and 40s; and the
next generation, including Sichtermann and Koch whose work on mythological
sarcophagi has been appearing since the 1960s and 70s, and Brilliant,
whose book Visual Narrative appeared in 1984, are by no means
the only scholars to whom one might point in discussing the development of
studies of meaning and program on mythological sarcophagi. A younger
generation, of which Koortbojian is a member, has continued this project,
although others of the cohort are exploring more historical issues of
gender (as Susan Wood) or commerce (as Patricio Pensabene).